Eki Bright - The Case for DIY Routing
When I set out making the first prototypes of Eki Bright, my train timetables iOS app for the Tokyo metropolitan area, I had no intentions of tackling routing. In fact, that was one of the selling points; the lack of routing, like lack of maps, made it visually and conceptually simpler for solving the problem of getting the next train departure time at any particular station.
I eventually did add routing, in a form I call DIY routing, but it grew organically out of the existing feature set, and it stays within the same niche as I’ve been targeting thus far: train riders who know where they’re going and how to get there. A tool for power users, so-to-speak.
In this post, I want to make the case for DIY routing: why it’s a useful addition to the full-featured routing apps we all use regularly. I’ve never used anything like DIY routing before, so either it’s already obsolete, or the problem was solved well enough by other apps that no one had bothered to explore other solutions until now.
I’ll use Google Maps the illustrative example of a full-featured routing app. I’ll use 乗換案内 (Norikae Annai or Japan Transit Planner in English) as the illustrative example of a railway-only routing app. And this post will be focused on the Tokyo-area of Japan.
